Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge

By Kerstin Thompson Architects

Client Bundanon Trust

Award RIBA International Awards for Excellence 2024

Bundanon Art Museum Bridge outside museum entrancejpg — Bundanon Art Museum & Bridge © Rory Gardiner

Bundanon Art Museum & Bridge combines an underground gallery with an extraordinary 165 meter “Bridge” for an art collection gifted to the Australian people in 1993 by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd.

Bundanon Art Museum & Bridge combines an underground art gallery and collection store, with a 165m “Bridge” of bedrooms and other indoor and outdoor spaces, for a collection gifted to the Australian people by artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd. Set in a forest landscape on the shores of the Shoalhaven River, in New South Wales, Bundanon is prone both to fire and flood. The logic was to design a Bridge resilient to flooding and gallery resistant to fire. As intended by the Boyds, Kerstin Thompson’s architecture manifests their ambition to foster an appreciation and understanding of art and the environment.

The new structures at Bundanon were commissioned to enable the Trust to expand its activities, and to establish a centre for creative arts, education, research and ideas. All serving to open up the collection, previously hidden, to the public. 

The new Art Museum and Bridge are located adjacent to the historic Boyd cluster of earlier bungalows and Education Centre by Murcutt, Lewin and Lark, creating an accessible core in this rolling landscape.

The decision to locate the Art Museum underground was precipitated by an earlier bushfire which led to the evacuation of the art collection. Coupled with the ambition to secure the collection against fire the heavy concrete structure offers thermal mass and a stable microclimate beneath a reinstated hillock (which also maintains the setting for the Boyd Education Centre), reducing the demand on mechanical systems. The spoil from excavating the gallery and store was kept on site and used to enlarge one of the hillocks. This exaggeration of the natural landscape is a form of land art in itself.

The Bridge, as much infrastructure as building, houses a Creative Learning Centre that spans between two hillocks suspended above a reinstated wet gully.

The 165 meter long structure permits seasonal torrents of floodwater to run through the landscape and river floodwater to rise up below it. The steel structure that supports the Bridge, as much pier or viaduct, strides across the gully landing lightly where it touches the ground.

The “Bridge” accommodates 32 bedrooms, breezeways, creative learning, dining spaces and a public café. As the architect explains, climate is central to the experience of being in these buildings, be it the coolth of the gallery or The Bridge where visitors are, in the spirit of Boyd’s practice of painting, invited to be en plein air. And, from afar the Bridge places a measure across the landscape.

The concept both preserves and transforms the landscape setting. The masterplan offers a paradigm shift in the way we think about landscape, from the purely picturesque to an ecological one.

Ultimately Bundanon is extraordinary for the manner in which it attunes the visitor to the landscape, and in so doing to nature and climate, place and time. As the client the Bundanon Trust explains, this ‘is a landscape that has provided learning experiences that are explicitly connected to place and respect Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing. We have watched on as a building and place have allowed a complete immersion and connection to the land and to each other.’

Location: Illaroo, Australia

Date of completion: 21/12/2021

Cost: Confidential

Gross area internal: 2151 m²

Contractor: ADCO Constructions

Project Management: Ethos Urban

Planning Consultant: Locale Consulting

Structural Engineer: Irwinconsult (WSP)

Services Engineer and Lighting Consultant: Steensen Varming

Sustainability: Atelier Ten

Landscape Architect: Wraight & Associates with Craig Burton

Quantity Surveyor / Cost Consultant: WT Partnership